The Honey Phase

Nokkhotro,

I remember, a long time ago, when I fell for someone.

You know that honey-sweet, technicolor, not-yet-official stage, my favorite human feeling to try to name. It's the stretch after the doubt and before the confession. You both know, without either of you saying how.

We have a lot of words for it, but none quite feels right, not specific enough, since every love story is unique.

Psychology calls that obsessive, floaty, can't-stop-thinking-about-them buzz limerence. When it's mutual, when you both know without ever saying it out loud, it becomes something more specific: mutual limerence.

Living in the liminal space, where you are no longer just friends but not quite lovers yet, has a classic name too: nascent love, or budding love. Nascent means just coming into being. It's not love yet. It's love becoming.

It's something you feel loudly, quietly, and peacefully, all at once. Something like a warm drink you just finished. There are butterflies, yes, but it's more like your nervous system turned its volume up. You notice their hands more. You replay a ten-second interaction for an hour and find a new detail each time.

The world literally looks more colorful. That's not poetry, that's dopamine and norepinephrine. Colors get saturated. Ordinary days feel cinematic. You catch yourself smiling at nothing while looking at your phone.

Time gets strange. Hours with them feel like minutes, minutes apart feel like a soft ache. You become a detective of micro-signals. The way they looked at you a half-second too long. The way you both reached for the same thing and laughed.

And it's tenderly anxious in the best way. No jealousy yet, no weight, no history to ruin things. Just two people on the edge of a cliff, holding hands without admitting they're holding hands. You don't want to rush to make it official, because part of you knows this unspoken certainty is more intimate than any label could be.

It's like we're in on a secret that we haven't told each other yet.

I called this the Honey Phase. Not honeymoon, honey. Thick, slow, golden, and you want to stay in it. There's a word in Tagalog, kilig, for that shivery, giddy, stomach-flutter feeling when something romantic is happening, even if no one has said anything yet.

I have not experienced the Honey Phase, or the kilig, with you, Nokkhotro. Yet when I see your name, your face, I feel like I'm standing in that liminal space again. Then I remember the reality, and I turn gray. The coldest, harshest gray there is.

I go quiet.

I remember, as you grow up, the kid in you fades away slowly, and all the colorful emotions turn into a cold gray stone sculpture.

Maybe that's the actual cost of growing up. You don't stop feeling things. You just learn how to hold a feeling without letting it move your face. The kid version of me would have told you already, badly, too fast, probably at the wrong hour, but told you. The version of me writing this letter has learned to keep the stone still instead.

I think that's what you are to me now: proof that the kid is still in there somewhere, under the gray. Not gone, just buried under years of learning how to survive my own wanting. Every time your name shows up, something briefly cracks open. The old colors leak through the stone for a second. Then I remember every reason I have for staying still, and I close it back up.

I'm not writing this to ask you to open it for me. I don't think that's what this letter is for. I think I just wanted, once, to describe the exact shade of gray this is, so it stops being nothing and starts being something with a name, the way limerence has a name, the way kilig has a name.

So here it is, Nokkhotro. Not the Honey Phase. Not nascent love. Just a stone that remembers, faintly, what it felt like to be warm.

— Faraway From Your Orbit.